Virginia Raggi and Alessandro Di Battista of the Five Star Movement in 2016, urging Italians to vote no in the December constitutional referendum

Jacopo Landi / Nurphoto / Getty

Therottamatore — demolition man, Matteo Renzi’s nickname (1) — has finally been demolished. ‘I’m going back to Pontassieve, like every weekend. I’ll go into the house, they’ll all be asleep... just as usual. Except that this time is different. My cardboard boxes, books, clothes and notebooks will be coming with me. I’ve closed up the residence on the third floor of the Palazzo Chigi [the Italian prime minister’s official residence]. I’m really going home.’ This was Matteo Renzi’s Facebook post in response to the referendum, in which 60% of voters on a record turnout of over 65% rejected his plan for constitutional reform.

Renzi’s fall is not that surprising. The former mayor of Florence has become the victim of the logic that carried him to power in February 2014, a logic characteristic of the Italian political system, which keeps producing new men of the moment, then dumps them almost as quickly to satisfy the desire for change felt by many, but without questioning the status quo (2). This process felt technocratic under Mario Monti (2011-3) and Enrico Letta (2013-4), but became more political with the rise of Renzi, which was based on his criticism of the establishment.

From the start, there was something Machiavellian about his position. This prince could have resisted losing his innovative capital — Machiavelli would have called it ‘corruption’ — trying to win popularity by breaking from the neoliberal policies that have governed Italy for 30 years. But that would have been alien to his political DNA, and that of the social forces that swept him to power. He could also have gone further down the Christian Democrat route and tried to form a huge, catch-all centrist party — the ‘party of the nation’ — building on a special relationship with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. But the rottamatore’s pride got the better of him. He was convinced he had the moderate electorate in his pocket and thought he could ditch Berlusconi and other parties. So he chose the Bonapartist path of consensus by plebiscite, with a referendum that he made too much about himself. Every political force was against him, as were the unions and even some in his own party. He staked everything and lost, in particular because of the youth vote.

Besides suiting his swaggering style, a referendum did make some sense: Renzi was aware that his image was losing appeal and his constitutional reform plan (3), based on anti-establishment rhetoric, gave him a good opportunity to repair his reformist credentials. It also forced the Five Star Movement (M5S), his main competitor on change, to present itself as defender of the status quo. A victory would have freed him from the minority of rebels in his party and enabled him to break the Democratic Party’s (Partito Democratico, PD) links with the left.

Popular discontent

His error was underestimating the level of popular discontent and believing that he could still soothe it, as Berlusconi had, with fine words, false promises and an aggressive domination of the media. As former director of Corriere della Sera Ferruccio de Bortoli has written, Renzi didn’t realise, after three years in power, that Italians no longer saw him as the outsider, representing the promise of change: ‘he was power’; he had the means to change things, but did nothing (Il Fatto Quotidiano, 12 December 2016).

Renzi’s campaign ads said he’d quit politics if he lost — which no one really believed — but his insatiable appetite for power will prevent him even taking a (well-earned) sabbatical. He will probably be busy over the next few months settling scores in the PD, to stop the sections of the party that have so far supported him — particularly the powerful AreaDem, led by culture minister Dario Franceschini — joining his main rivals, Pier Luigi Bersani and Massimo D’Alema. He has called for a quick dissolution of parliament and fresh election, on behalf of the 12 million (40%) who voted yes. This result, won without allies, would allow him to present himself as the victim of a conservative bloc that prevented him from modernising the country: while he waits for the election, Renzi continues to discreetly operate the levers of power.

Renzi’s campaign ads said he’d quit politics if he lost, but his insatiable appetite for power will prevent him even taking a (well-earned) sabbatical

Paolo Gentiloni, appointed prime minister on 12 December 2016, is unlikely to be much more than a figurehead. The unassuming former foreign minister won just 14% of the vote in the centre-right mayoral primary in Rome in 2013. He will have to rely on the same parliamentary majority as Renzi and has retained nearly all of Renzi’s ministerial team. The only notable changes are the dismissal of education minister Stefania Giannini, originator of a highly contested school reform that got her blamed for the government’s defeat, and the promotion of Maria Elena Boschi, the former minister for constitutional reform and one of Renzi’s staunchest supporters. She is now secretary of the council of ministers, a key post as major governmental issues will cross her desk.

By running the government from outside, Renzi may hope to control the actions and duration of the Gentiloni administration, while keeping himself free for the coming campaign, but this will put his party in a difficult position: the PD will once again have to assume control of the government during the campaign and, as D’Alema wrote in La Repubblica on 12 December, it could end up ‘swamped by a wave’ in the election, handing it to Beppe Grillo and his supporters. M5S has already positioned itself as the defender of ‘citizens’ dignity’ against a government and a party that rides roughshod over ‘popular sovereignty’ (4).

M5S has managed to establish itself in voters’ minds as the true opposition to constitutional reform. It has for months monopolised the political and media stage, especially thanks to its rising star, Alessandro Di Battista, a young politician who ran a high-profile summer campaign, travelling all over Italy, visiting beaches on a scooter decorated with a large sticker reading #iodicono (I say no), while Italy’s political class were on holiday. As other parties gradually came out against the reform, they seemed mere auxiliaries to M5S, which is now seeking to capitalise on the referendum result to trigger a fresh election. As a consequence of the electoral law of May 2015 (5), opposed by Grillo, who called it a fraud against the Italian people, M5S is in a strong position to win the next election. All the more so since fear of anti-political movements has waned: after the ‘no’ vote, the financial markets and banks did not melt down as predicted. Perhaps this fear is now only felt by Italian and EU political leaders.

Achieving a single line

Only M5S has managed to get its voters to adhere to a single line: 95% of its supporters apparently voted no in December’s referendum. Grillo’s party has learned to do politics. Its fluidity means it can present itself to the public in multiple guises: as guarantor of justice; defender of constitutional values; reformer; green; protector of the rights of society’s weakest; anti-immigrant and anti-European. It knows how to play up its agitator and institutional sides as occasion demands, without losing — especially among the young — the allure of being different from the other parties. Once they get down to business, M5S politicians turn out to be less dazzling. M5S candidate Virginia Raggi won the mayoral election in Rome in June 2016, but has been paralysed since by resignations and internal battles. The police searched Rome city hall on 15 December.

Berlusconi, again restored to life, seems another big winner from the referendum. After waiting carefully, he read the mood of the electorate and, like the political animal he is, at the very last moment placed his party, Forza Italia, in the no camp. Even if a sizeable minority of his supporters voted yes (20-40% depending on the region, according to Istituto Cattaneo estimates), and although he no longer wants to run the country, he has managed to find a significant political role in future power balances. Especially if the outcome of the next election is a German-style grand coalition, which is what he hopes.

The minority current within the PD also hesitated for a long time before coming out against the reform almost too late. This decision contributed to Renzi’s defeat, depriving him of almost 30% of PD votes — a loss he only partly compensated for with centre-right support — but it reinforced the image of Bersani and D’Alema as opportunists and made them appear (even more than Berlusconi and Renzi) the embodiment of the establishment, powerful people whose main concern was their own survival.

This situation could have opened up a gap to the left of the PD. The Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (‘left, ecology and freedom’, SEL) party strongly opposed the reform and is therefore nominally among the winners. But its capacity to make an impact politically has diminished, as its campaign was overshadowed by M5S. Credited in the polls with a miserable 4%, and still divided between different currents and factions, it has found it hard to create a clear political role: the space for social protest is occupied by M5S, which prevents any reconfiguration of protest on anti-neoliberal lines. By overshadowing the Northern League (Italy’s equivalent of France’s Front National), M5S is helping to contain xenophobia, very visible elsewhere in Europe.

Italy’s institutional left is characterised by a lack of political imagination and has trotted out the same slogans since the 1980s. The day after the referendum, Giuliano Pisapia, leading light of the SEL and former mayor of Milan, said he was open to an alliance with the PD if they severed links with the centrist forces that had given them a parliamentary majority in recent years. He even expressed willingness to be a candidate for this supporting role, once he had united ‘the left outside the PD’ in a ‘new progressive framework’ (La Repubblica, 7 December 2016).

The SEL’s national coordinator, Nicola Fratoianni, called this plan ‘democracy without the people’, unsuitable as a means of ‘forming a political judgment about the real country’ (Huffington Post, 7 December 2016). He called for a union of the left in opposition to neoliberalism (and therefore the PD) ‘like all the left in the world, from Sanders to Corbyn, via Iglesias and Tsipras’ (Il Manifesto, 3 December 2016). But Fratoianni is forgetting that these progressive experiments in the US, UK, Spain and Greece developed in the context of strong social mobilisation. The political framework does not create the movement. The people who are suffering the effects of the economic crisis see M5S and, to a lesser extent, the Northern League, as better solutions; without establishing a new ‘sentimental connection’ (in Antonio Gramsci’s words) with them, every alternative left project risks remaining without the people.

Raffaele Laudani

Raffaele Laudani is associate professor in the history of political thought at the University of Bologna.

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Translated by George Miller

(1) A rottamatore breaks up old cars for scrap. Renzi gave himself the nickname.